Puffball. Fay Weldon

      Bella and Ray were dining out, with Mr Lee-Fox. Perhaps if Liffey rang later? At midnight?

      ‘No. It wouldn’t be practical,’ said Liffey.

      ‘Any message?’

      ‘No,’ said Liffey.

      

      ‘You do look cold,’ said Mabs. ‘Pull a chair to the fire.’ And she poured Liffey some coffee, in a cracked cup. The coffee was bitter.

      

      Mabs chatted about the children, and schools, and cows and smoking chimneys. Tucker said nothing. The kitchen was large, stone flagged, handsome and cold. The same pieces of furniture—substantial rather than gracious—had stood here for generations—dresser, tables, sideboards, chairs—and were half-despised, half-admired by virtue of their very age. Tucker and Mabs boasted of the price they would fetch in the auction room, while using the table, almost on purpose, to mend sharp or oily pieces of farm machinery, and the edge of the dresser for whittling knives, and covering every available surface with the bric-a-brac of everyday life—receipts, bills, brochures, lists, padlocks, beads, hair rollers, badges, lengths of string, plastic bags, scrawled addresses, children’s socks and toys, plasters, schoolbooks, and tubes of this and pots of that. Neither Mabs nor Tucker, thought Liffey, marvelling, were the sort to throw anything away, and had the grace to feel ashamed of herself for being the sort of person who threw out a cup when it was chipped, or a dress when she was tired of it, or furniture when it bored her.

      

      Cadbury Farm, she saw, served as the background to Tucker and Mabs’ life, it was not, as she was already making out of Honeycomb Cottage, a part, almost the purpose, of life itself.

      

      Liffey went home as soon as she politely could.

      ‘It’s getting dark,’ said Mabs. ‘Tucker had better go with you. I’m not saying there’s a headless horseman out there, but you might meet a flying saucer. People do, round here. Mostly on their way home from the pub, of course. All the same, Tucker’ll take you. Won’t you, Tucker?’

      ‘That’s right,’ said Tucker.

      

      But Liffey insisted on going by herself, and then felt frightened and wished Tucker was indeed with her, whatever the cost, particularly at that bend of the road where the wet branches seemed unnaturally still, as if waiting for something sudden and dreadful to happen. But she hurried on, and pulled the pretty curtains closed when she got to the cottage, and switched on the radio, and soon was feeling better again, or at any rate not frightened; merely angry with Richard and upset by her own feelings towards Tucker, and fearful of some kind of change in herself, which she could hardly understand, but knew was happening, and had its roots in the realisation that she was not the nice, good, kind, pivotal person she had believed, around whom the rest of an imperfect creation revolved, but someone much like anyone else, as nice and as good as circumstance would allow, but not a whit more: and certainly no better than anyone else at judging the rightness or wrongness of her own actions.

      

      Desire for Richard overwhelmed her when she lay down to sleep on the mattress on the floor. It was, for Liffey, an unusual and physical desire for the actual cut and thrust of sexual activity, rather than the emotional need for tenderness and recognition and the celebration of good things which Liffey was accustomed to interpreting as desire, for lack of a better word. Presently images of Tucker replaced images of Richard, and Liffey rose and took a sleeping pill, thinking this might help her. All it did was to seem to paralyse her limbs whilst agitating her mind still more; and a sense of the blackness and loneliness outside began to oppress her, and an image of a headless horseman to haunt her, and she wondered whether choosing to live in the country had been an act of madness, not sanity, and presently rose and took another sleeping pill, and then fell into a fitful sleep, in which Tucker loomed large and erect.

      

      But she had locked the door. So much morality, prudence, and the habit of virtue enabled her to do.

       In Residence

      At the time that Liffey was taking her second sleeping pill Bella offered one to Richard. Bella sat on the end of his bed, which Helga the au pair had made up out of a sofa in Bella’s study. Bella wore her glasses and looked intelligent and academic, and as if she knew what she was talking about. Her legs were hairy beneath fine nylon. Richard declined the pill.

      ‘Liffey doesn’t believe in pills,’ he said.

      ‘You aren’t Liffey,’ said Bella, firmly.

      Richard considered this.

      ‘I decide what we do,’ said Richard, ‘but I let Liffey decide what’s good for us. And taking sleeping pills isn’t, except in extreme circumstances, and by mutual decision.’ ‘Liffey isn’t here,’ Bella pointed out. ‘And it was she who decided you’d live in the country, not you.’

      It was true. Liffey had edged over, suddenly and swiftly, if unconsciously, into Richard’s side of the marriage, breaking unwritten laws.

      

      ‘You don’t think Liffey misread the timetable on purpose?’ He was on the downward slopes of the mountain of despondency, enjoying the easy run down: resentments and realisations and justifications rattled along at his heels, and he welcomed them. He wanted Bella to say yes, Liffey was not only in the wrong, but wilfully in the wrong.

      ‘On purpose might be too strong,’ said Bella. ‘Try by accident on purpose.’

      ‘It’s unfair of her,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve always tried to make her happy, I really have, Bella. I’ve taken being a husband very seriously.’

      ‘Bully for you,’ said Bella, settling in cosily at the end of the bed, digging bony buttocks in.

      ‘But one expects a return. Is that unreasonable?’

      ‘Never say one,’ said Bella. ‘Say “I”. “One” is a class-based concept, used to justify any amount of bad behaviour.’

      ‘Very well,’ said Richard. ‘I expect a return. And the truth is, Liffey has shown that she doesn’t care for my comfort and convenience, only for her own. And when I look into my heart, where there used to be a kind of warm round centre, which was love for Liffey, there’s now a cold hard patch. No love for Liffey. It’s very upsetting, Bella.’

      He felt that Bella had him on a pin, was a curious investigator of his painful flutterings. But it was not altogether unpleasant. A world which had been black and white was now transfused with colour: rich butterfly wings, torn but powerful, rose and fell, and rose again. To be free from love was to be free indeed.

      Bella laughed.

      ‘Happiness! Love!’ she marvelled. ‘Years since I heard anyone talking like that. What do you mean? Neurotic need? Romantic fantasy?’

      ‘Something’s lost,’ he persisted. ‘Call it what you like. I’m a very simple person, Bella.’

      

      Simple, he said. Physical, of course, was what he meant. Able to give and take pleasure, and in particular sexual pleasure. Difficult, now, not to take a marked sexual interest in Bella; she, clothed and cosy on his bed, and he, naked in it, and only the thickeness of a quilt between them. Or if not a sexual interest, certainly a feeling that the natural, ordinary thing to do was to take her in his arms so that their conversation could continue on its real level, which was without words. The very intimacy of their present situation deserved this resolution.

      

      These feelings, more to do with a proper sense of what present circumstances required than anything more permanent, Richard interpreted both as evidence of his loss of love for Liffey, and desire for Bella, and the one reinforced the other.